Chapter 1: What mystery of navigation did the world's greatest minds struggle with?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's an archipelago in the far west of the UK. And I mean far west. Like, once you think you're in the west, like around Cornwall, keep going. And then take a ferry another three hours west, and you'll find yourself in a collection of islands called the Isles of Scilly.
That's Scilly spelled S-C-I-L-L-Y, not silly ha-ha.
That's 99PI producer Kelly Prime.
In fact, silly is not haha at all. It's a place that's hard to wrap your mind around. The islands sit in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, so you'll find tropical plants like giant palms and birds of paradise all blooming up against the backdrop of the rugged North Atlantic.
It's also historically one of the deadliest places in the UK to travel by sea.
These islands are plopped down in churning waters with jagged rocks rising all around like the jaws of some sort of mythical sea creature. In this past October, I found myself on a little boat called the Buccaneer right in the middle of it.
It's crazy, man.
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Chapter 2: Why are the Isles of Scilly significant in maritime history?
It's a crazy place. There's just rocks everywhere. As you're going along, you don't realize we're passing rocks under the water all the time.
The buccaneer belongs to a scuba diver named Todd Stevens. Todd has been diving the shipwrecks around Sili for over two decades.
If you're into shipwrecks, it's really hard not to find one here. At least 900 shipwrecks litter the coasts of Sili, probably more. Sometimes ships will sink on top of other older shipwrecks, so it's difficult to say for sure.
Are there shipwrecks below us right now?
Yeah, yeah, we've passed quite a few. If you'd have been asking me that as we were just coming along Samaria shoreline, there's at least half a dozen along there.
Oh, my God.
Are there life jackets on this boat? We were specifically looking for the remains of one particular disaster, where not one but four ships were lost on the same night. The HMS Association, Romney, Eagle, and Firebrand.
And we're just coming up on the firebrand now. So we're right over it now. The wreck lays just across here. And her bows are up that way because her anchors are up that end. And then she lays across here.
The wrecks happened on October 22nd, 1707. It was quite literally a dark and stormy night, and there was a fleet of British naval ships bravely led by an admiral named Cloudsley Shovel.
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Chapter 3: What led to the deadliest shipwreck in British history?
What follows is a tale of imperial greed, a lucrative contest, and an obsessive underdog who became his own worst enemy.
But before we tell you about all that, we need to explain what longitude actually is, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
Basically, longitude is the east-west coordinate. So if you think of the Earth as an orange and you peel 24 vertical pieces of that orange, each peel represents 15 degrees of longitude away from the prime meridian. And that's because longitude is counted off in the same direction as the Earth is rotating on its axis. So, you know, I think I'll start over on this description.
It's gotten away from me.
Yeah.
This is Alexi Baker, manager of the History of Science and Technology Collection at the Peabody Museum. And see? I told you this was hard.
Should I use the orange? Should I not use the orange? Okay.
Maybe let's give it a try without any citrus fruits.
So longitude are the vertical lines on the globe and latitude are the horizontal lines. And when you move besides beyond vertical and horizontal lines, it does quickly get away from you.
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Chapter 4: How did the longitude problem challenge navigators for centuries?
Like seasick enough that we are still talking about it 290 years later. But H1 performed marvelously.
In fact, when the HMS Orford was on its way back to Britain, the ship's sailing master had them on course to pass a landmark just south of Dartmouth. But Harrison, using H-1, sounded the alarm. He was able to pinpoint the ship's location as 60 miles off course to the west.
And then it turned out that he was right. And you can imagine how that affected the captain, everybody on the crew.
Harrison's timekeeper was able to correct the ship's longitude.
Wow, that was a magic trick. That was just, how did you do that? And how he had done it was with that clock. And the whole crew of the ship he was on, they're all ready to stand up for him. He's not a crank. It's not what everybody was expecting, but he's not a crank. He's got something.
So with the blessing of the Royal Society, all eight members of the official Board of Longitude assembled to hear about the successful Portugal trial and to judge Harrison's sea clock.
And Harrison is there with his clock. And what does he do? He says, I don't think it's really good enough yet.
He didn't want that big trial?
No, not yet.
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